The Bench
As Laura sat she noticed a plaque on the bench, “In memory of Grandma Majersky. We wish we could have sat with you and watched the sun rise as the trains went by.”
“I wish I had people who would want to put my name on a bench,” Laura thought.
Then for a second it occurred to her, “Why did I sit down? I should just go home.”
As much as the desire was to leave, Laura stayed on the bench.
She sat there and wondered how long the bench had been there. She didn’t remember a bench being near the train tracks, and thought she knew every inch of that park from all of the times she would run away from home and hide for the day to get away from being a disappointment. She recalled the broken wheel from a soccer net in the trees to the north, she wondered if the lucky penny she buried in the sand on the playground was still there, and her initials were still in the concrete footer of the flagpole nearby.
There were exactly 310 cracks in the concrete along the path from the field house to the west end of the parking lot. She knew this because she counted them, stepping over each one so she wouldn’t “break her momma’s back” when she was eight years old running through the park. She knew that, on the miniature golf course, if you hit one inch past the weld on the hole with the windmill, the ball would bounce into the opening under the windmill, careen three times as it traveled through the opening, come out the other side, and go in the hole.
The tennis courts were put in when she was nine, replacing one of the soccer fields. She remembered her dad calling them a complete waste of money and only being put in so the women with no jobs would have something to do during the day.
As she thought about the sledding hill again, this time how she would roll down the grass during summer, Laura wondered if someone ever found the doll she threw over the fence at the top of the hill.
She remembered that she lost a soccer ball in the “Do Not Mow”marsh. When she went to find it her foot got stuck in the mud and she started crying,“Is anyone ever going to find me?” Worse than losing the ball was knowing that if she got out of the marsh, she would have to tell her father she lost the ball. Her father, true to form, didn’t care about her being stuck, but instead he blasted Laura for her lack of ball control that caused her to let the ball go into the marsh in the first place. She recalled the punishment that he came up with, cleaning and polishing all of the shoes in the house because she almost ruined her shoes.
As Laura looked around while sitting on the bench, she noticed the batting cages. All she could remember was she couldn’t swing a bat in any way to please her father. It was like a jail, stuck in the cage with balls being launched at her. Swing and a miss, swing and a slight connection, what seemed like a great swing to her would be dismissed as either a lucky hit or, in her father’s eyes, she could have hit it straighter.
Never. Good. Enough.
That summed up Laura’s life in the eyes of her father.